My 20s: The Meaning of the Meaningless life

What is the meaning of life? and what is the meaning of my life? is life meaningless?

As I'm approaching the end of my 20s (Currently I'm 28) wearing my wisdom hat in front of my earlier-20s versions of me and the clown hat in front of my future versions of me, I feel lost quite a bit!

I can't be sure if I'm figuring things out or just pretending. Am I maturing or I'm just too delusional to see the mess?

Despite these uncertainties in my life, I'm sure of my desire to learn and evolve. It's not always at the same strength or consistency (Sadly!) but it's always there and plays a big part in answering the question of (why I'm still alive?)

Here I'll take you through the lessons I think I learned from this period, It might sound too basic or too typical. but I don't expect it to be a total waste of time (At least my current version thinks so!)

The meaning of life

I'm a fan of Lex Fridman's podcast. He is an intelligent interviewer who can most of the time create quality conversations with each guest. He always makes sure to ask that one question in each interview and it always catches my attention. it's

"What's the meaning of life?"

In each one of these interviews I try to pay close attention to the guest's answers to this question, how do they justify this life and how do they see it?

Going through these various points of view I can say that life in itself is meaningless. It doesn't come with meaning in itself. On the other hand, it allows you to create a meaningful version of it that is unique to you. It's too abstract and vague in itself but it's too dynamic and open to create billions of unique versions of it attached to each person.

The meaning of your life is shaped by the experiences that you come across, by what you love and hate, and your desires, hopes, ideas, fears, and sadness. Life itself is never fair and will never be. It doesn't care about you or your loved ones, but your version of it does! The meaning of your life exists in you, your next actions, and your memories.

Love

Love is a mystery on its own. It's a beautiful tricky state that is tricky to get right. I've been in love as well as broken up. it always has the greatness of a calming feeling and the pain of leaving someone who was an important close part of you. It's, without a doubt, an important part of my version of life, a tricky part that I never seem to get right.

Sometimes I overvalue it, and sometimes I undervalue it, never knowing the truly balanced formula of it. I experienced love in multiple stages in my life, it saw me as a naive young man and as an old hurt soul. It saw me when I felt happy, lost, hurt, depressed, energetic, weak, and strong. I saw it when it was too shiny, too dim, pretty, ruthless, and comforting. Sometimes we meet and stay a good amount of time, sometimes we just pass through each other, sometimes we talk, and sometimes we just eye each other. I learned that as dangerous as it can be and as beautiful it can get it's mostly not a bad idea to go through it, but it's definitely a bad idea to seek it. Love is too shiny, it can make you forget about the bigger picture and blind you from seeing the rest of the puzzle.

Relationships are too complicated to be just defined through love. it's hard work and collaboration of factors like respect, understanding, growing up, honesty, sincerity, strength, and of course love. I learned that love is an important thing, but it's not the whole story.

Work

As part of being an adult in this world, you have mostly worked some time somewhere whether it was for a company, employer, or for your own business, at least once. Work is undeniably one of the factors that affect a big portion of your life. sometimes it's too big, sometimes it's not as big as others, but it's always there at some point in your life. In my 20s, work resembled a big part of my day (and it still does) which resulted in a bigger impact that expanded outside of its basic definition.

Through work, I met new people some of them became colleagues and sometimes friends. Through work, I've been to different places that affected a part of my life.

Like love; Work is also tricky. if you are not careful it can eat up your life. Unlike love; work can be more forcing. sometimes you need to work to survive, yeah it's sad, but it's also true. One thing I learned about work is that don't follow others' definitions and evaluations of work in their life blindly. it's never fully suitable for you. Don't compare and don't imitate without questioning. Work is not family. Work is not friends. Work works. Love it or hate it. make it bigger or smaller. shape it as you want and please. but don't mix it with the other sides of your life.

Distractions and The Inner-self

As we advance in our lives, we grow up from both inside and outside. And in a world with unlimited ways of distractions, we sometimes get too distracted from what we are and disconnected from our inner selves. The sounds, the screams, the calls from your core. I hate losing this connection and unfortunately, I did multiple times. One thing I found helpful is to get rid of unnecessary social media apps, add more real-life conversations with people I care about and can get quality conversations with, and start meditation.

At first, Meditation didn't seem quite convincing to me, "what is so special about sitting like this pretending to be a wise man?", but when I gave it a chance, I felt my weight, and start acknowledging more of my buried thoughts, hearing my sounds and talking to my inner selves (yup I have multiple ones). Unfortunately, I'm not doing it consistently, but I can't think of a reason against trying it and recommending it to people. I used a simple free app called Medito, and of course, you can use whatever app or not even use one, It's up to you!

Saying that I must clarify that I'm not demonizing Social media apps and I'm not saying that I don't use them! I just want to emphasize using it wisely. I try to use it to connect with people and if there is a chance to meet them in real life (if we both are interested in that) I try to go for it.

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In the end, life continues and we continue to change, grow and evolve as long as we still have the potential for that.